Defend the
Palestinian People – For an
Arab/Hebrew Workers State in a
Socialist Federation of the Near
East

NOVEMBER
17 – As soon as the U.S. elections
were over, the Zionist Israeli
government launched a rain of death
against the beleaguered Palestinian
population of Gaza. The killing of the
military leader of Hamas was
accompanied by a full-scale barrage of
indiscriminate aerial bombing. So far,
the death toll in the tiny Gaza strip
is over 30, including nine children
killed by the supposed “pinpoint”
bombardment. Tens of thousands of
Israeli reservists have been called up
and a ground assault may well be
imminent. Meanwhile, U.S. imperialism
stands fully behind the Israeli
militarists, while threatening Syria.
Gaza
must not stand alone!
Class-conscious workers should
mobilize their power in concrete
action to defend the Palestinian
people and defeat the Zionist
militarists and their imperialist
backers.

If
U.S. president Barack Obama began his
re-election campaign with the murder
of Osama bin Laden (see “Barack
Obama’s
Global Assassination Bureau,” The
Internationalist, November
2012), Israeli premier Benjamin
Netanyahu launched his campaign for
the January 2013 elections by the
terrorist assassination of Ahmed
al-Jabari. Jabari was the head of the
al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm
of Hamas, the governing Islamist party
of Gaza. Israeli leaders and the
pro-Zionist imperialist media pretend
that the attack on Gaza was in
response to rockets from Gaza aimed at
Israel. This is an absurd pretext,
since rockets have killed a grand
total of 13 people over the last four
years, less than the number of
fatalities in an average week of
Israeli traffic accidents. Rather, the
serial murderer Netanyahu, who is
responsible for killing thousands of
civilians, prefers to run for
reelection with bombs dropping and
Palestinians dying.

But
the blood-drenched premier is hardly
the only Israeli politician who
classifies as a war criminal. His
partner in crime is war minister Ehud
Barak, the former leader of the
“Labor” opposition, who ran Israel’s
2009 Operation Cast Lead that
slaughtered upwards of 1,400 residents
of the Gaza. And the current leader of
the Zionist capitalist “Labor” Party,
Shelly Yachimovich, hasn’t uttered a
word against the murderous attack on
Gaza, nor against the expansion of
settlements in the Occupied
Territories of the West Bank. All
Israeli capitalist politicians are
responsible for this latest crime of
Zionist militarism. In contrast, there
have beendemonstrations
of several hundred protesters in Tel
Aviv and Haifa against the Israeli
attacks. They have faced bloodthirsty
fascistic counterdemonstrators calling
for the extermination of Arabs,
leftists and homosexuals.

In
Egypt, while the Cairo masses denounce
the Israeli attacks, the Islamist
leaders now in office are proposing a
long-term ceasefire with Israel. The
proposal is being prepared by Morsi
together with Turkish premier Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the emir of Qatar and
Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. This is
same gang of Islamist capitalist
leaders who have joined with U.S.
imperialism in trying to patch
together a pro-imperialist puppet
government to prepare the way for a
full-scale U.S./NATO attack on Syria.
And while the Zionists bomb Gaza, the
Egyptian government keeps the
Palestinian population there
imprisoned behind barbed wire and
steel barriers.

Some
leftists, such as Egypt’s
Revolutionary Socialists (who
notoriously supported the Muslim
Brotherhood candidate Morsi on the
second round of the presidential
election earlier this year) have said
the government should be “cutting all
ties with the Zionist enemy,
abolishing the Camp David agreement,
deploying the Egyptian army in Sinai
and permanently reopening the Rafah
crossing” (Socialist
Worker (U.K.), 17 November).
Genuinely revolutionary communists are
absolutely for opening the gates to
the Gaza Strip, but the idea that the
Egyptian government would undertake
military action to defend the
Palestinians is deeply false. Under
nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser,
Egypt ruled Gaza with an iron hand,
and ever since it has cooperated with
the Israeli occupation and starvation
blockade. However, Egyptian
workers and youth could march on
the Gaza border, cut off Egyptian
supplies of gas to Israel, and block
U.S. and Israeli ships from the Suez
Canal.

The
Israeli warmongers are always ready to
use the genocidal Nazi Holocaust
against Jews in Europe as an excuse
for their latest murderous rampage.
Yet the Zionist militarists have a
racist mentality that in many ways
reflects that of the anti-Semitic
German (and other) fascists, only
directed against another Semitic
people, the Arabs. In promising to
repeat the attacks on Gaza, Israeli
army leaders talk of “cutting the
grass,” by periodically mowing down
those who resist Zionist occupation.
The rocket attacks by Hamas, Islamic
jihad and others are ineffective and
counterproductive, but they are often
greeted by desperate Palestinians
filled with justifiable rage against
the Israeli starvation blockade. While
giving no political support to the
reactionary Islamists, or to the
Palestinian Authority which has become
a puppet of the Israeli occupiers, any
socialist opponent of Zionism must
stand for military defense of Gaza and
all the Occupied Territories.

Not
only is the savage Israeli assault not
a response to rocket launchings from
Gaza, it may have been intended to
undercut negotiations for an extended
ceasefire. As revealed in an article
by Gershon Baskin (“Israel’s
Shortsighted Assassination,” New
York Times, 17 November), the
slain al-Qassem Brigades leader Jabari
had received a draft ceasefire
proposal, drawn up by Baskin and the
Hamas deputy foreign minister and
supported by “key Hamas leaders,”
including detailed provisions for the
Gaza government to enforce a ban on
rocket launchings. Such an agreement
would have turned Hamas into a joint
client of Egypt and Israel. Yet even
that would not satisfy Zionist leaders
who are bent on war.

The
present assault on Gaza is only the
prelude to a wider conflagration in
the Middle East. In the days before
the assassination of Jabari, the
Israeli military shelled Syria from
the occupied Golan Heights. Meanwhile,
the Zionists are chomping at the bit
to attack Iran, supposedly to destroy
its nuclear facilities. Israel has
hundreds of nuclear weapons, and is
prepared to use them on civilian
populations, while Iran has none. The
real threat to (non-existent) peace in
the region is Israel, which has
launched war after war. And while
politically opposing the mullah regime
in Tehran (as well as the Islamist-led
opposition), we insist that Iran has
every right to develop nuclear weapons
against the very real military threats
it faces from Israel and the United
Sates. We call as well for the
exploited and oppressed throughout the
region to join with workers and
opponents of imperialism everywhere to
demand that U.S./NATO imperialists get
out of the Middle East.

Internationalist
Group at November 15 NYC protest
against Israeli attack on Gaza.(Internationalist
photo)

Over
the last year and a half, most of the
left has supported a supposed “Arab
Spring” and “revolutions” in Tunisia
and Egypt. Yet while the dictators
were toppled, the dictatorships
remain. Today “moderate” Islamist
rulers sit atop military-based regimes
allied with the imperialists. And
Libya, after a horrendous bloodbath,
has become a NATO protectorate run by
competing gangs of Islamist
terrorists. Now the opportunist
leftists are pulling the same sham
they did over Libya, claiming to
oppose Western intervention while
supporting Syrian “rebels” who are
begging for Western arms. The
Internationalist Group and League for
the Fourth International demand: U.S./
NATO imperialists, hands off
Syria. And while not
advocating an on-going boycott of all
things Israeli or divestment, which
are (fruitless) attempts at
engineering imperialist pressure on
Israel, we call today (as
we did at the time of the June 2010
Israeli attack on the Gaza aid
flotilla, see “Oakland
Picket
Blocks Israeli Ship”) for workers
action to defeat the Zionist
assault, particularly a
labor boycott of transport to and from
Israel.

As
we wrote of the last major Israeli
attack on Gaza:

“The
first task today must be to defend the
Palestinian people against the Israeli
occupier and oppressor. Recognizing
the Palestinian right to
self-determination and to a
Palestinian state, proletarian
internationalists also recognize the
right to existence and national
self-determination of the
Hebrew-speaking population while
opposing a religion-based, ethnically
exclusive regime such as Zionist
Israel – a state founded on the basis
of stealing the Palestinians’ lands
and expelling the people – which is
inherently oppressive to the
non-Jewish population and Arabs in
particular.

“The
Trotskyists of the League for the
Fourth International stand for an
Arab-Hebrew workers state in a
socialist federation of the Near
East.”

We
seek to build a common Trotskyist
party in all of Palestine as we fight
in the United States to break with the
Democratic and Republican parties of
capital, to form a revolutionary
workers party. Above all, it is
necessary to mobilize the working
class to defeat marauding U.S.
imperialism, without whose backing the
kill-crazed Zionist rulers of Israel
would never be able to get away with
mass murder the way they have for
decades. Smash
imperialism
and Zionism through international
socialist revolution!■